Best Food In China

Location

Looking up through the glass roofed terrace of People’s Restaurant, a cloudless afternoon sky serves as a nice backdrop for a relaxing lunch meal.

Now if only they wouldn’t blare house techno music out of the speakers during the afternoon.

A combo bar/restaurant/lounge, People’s Restaurant manages to employ numerous quirky eccentricities throughout its space on Julu Road. Patrons require pass codes given by phone, one of which opens a fake entrance and not told which one is which. The bathrooms feature fake door handles and confusing entry paths. And of course, the aforementioned music selection. I got the sense that the restaurant is quite enamored with its own ingenuity, and perhaps enjoys poking fun at its customers a bit, an odd marketing strategy to say the least.

But that doesn’t keep a primarily Chinese and Asian focused menu from delivering an otherwise enjoyable meal for the value.

Classic dishes receive an updated presentation to fit the chic night clientele’s sensibilities. San Kou Fan (literally, 3 mouthfuls of rice) are a set of 3 different types of tasty fried rice set inside separate tea cups and topped off with small portions of Dongpo Pork, Mapo Tofu, and a pan fried quails egg.

Wu gen chang wang, is a wickedly spicy hodgepodge of pork’s intestine and blood cake that arrives boiling in a paper bowl above a paraffin wax fire, reminiscent of the old high school experiment that holds a paper cup over a hot flame to boil water. The soft bits of offal are infused with the spicy broth, making a bowl of rice quite the tongue savior.

A boneless grilled salmon steak, perfectly cooked, sits alongside meticulously placed grilled vegetables and a light honey mustard sauce.

Spareribs come in a sticky sour plum sauce, soft and tender. The sauce is surprisingly light in its sweetness, striking a nice balance with the accompanying cured plum pits.

Some more artistic presentations of food definitely seem aimed at the night crowd, with attention to the food’s actual taste lost along the way. A miso glazed filet of cod is a bit cloying in its flavor and uses an immense plate, highlighting the negative space. And a specially designed ice bowl the size of a basketball fails to impress beyond its design, housing a dozen thin slices of bland mustard green.

The restaurant does have some customer friendly drink policies, with free coffee refills and apparently no corking fee for bringing your own bottle of wine. This seems aimed at offsetting the lack of an extensive wine list and mixed drink menu, the latter part made far more ironic by the fact the restaurant proudly claims it has the longest physical flat top bar (at 16 meters) in the city.

With its plush lounge seats on lower floors, extended bar space, its dark mood lighting, and a glass covered terrace that’s just meant to be gazed through at night time, People’s Restaurant clearly serves the late night chic crowd. Given the strange design choices and manner in which they are employed, the restaurant appears to engender a sense of exclusivity, in contrast to the egalitarian sounding name. But in spite of those somewhat frustrating design gimmicks, it also presents good value for a shared meal, at around 150 RMB a head and would certainly be an interesting visit, particularly at night.

by Jerome Yuan

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